Read & Reflect #4

I started with the Ted Talk this week and ended up spending four days watching talk after talk.  I find them fascinating.  I personally don't care much for fashion, but thought it was very interesting that designers had to work harder to create uniquely branded looks and not just the brands themselves.
The reading from Rosen was fascinating, but I had to continually Google names and such to better understand the full meaning of his words.  As a whole I can appreciate and incorporate the information into my future classroom. 
As I watched the video, Remix, I was practically elated.  At the conclusion of the film it felt like I had just watched my favorite movie for the first time.  Every other thought or concern I had had that day was wiped from my mind as if I was in shock.  I started thinking about appropriation and Mary Franco's presentation on age appropriate lesson plans I'd seen more than a year before.  If I take an image of artwork someone else made, change it in three significant ways and dub it my artwork how is that different than remixing music.
They say nothing in art is new anymore, no idea or way of thinking or representation, everything has been done before.  You as an artist can only make it bigger, better, etc.  So does that mean every piece of artwork I've ever made is copyright infringement??? NO!  Remix and Johanna both pointed out that you can't copyright creativity.  The creative ingenuity that Girl Talk exhibits on stage while preforming and creating his "music" could never in a million years have been created by the original musicians.  Artist like Glitch Mob, Ruckus Roboticus, Wax Tailor, Blackmill, and Skrillex (just to name a few of my favorites) creating Dubstep music, which to me is very similar to Mashups or Funk, are creating new music built upon the knowledge and musical stepping stones which came before them. 
Images of Duchamp "Fountain" and other Dadaist pieces started coming to mind and I wanted to see how student's creative process might be changed by listening to artist like Girl Talk or Skrillex.  But although Dubstep can be found on sites like Pandora would I find Girl Talk as well or artist of the Brazilian Funk genre.  Is there a difference in artist like Girl talk and Skrillex as far as copyright laws are concerned.  Both artists are building with what has come before. If I played these artist in my classroom would I be feeding into the delinquency of our nation or helping to create a stronger one.  Would I be able to find said music legally?
What can you appropriate in art; an exercise in taking existing pieces of art and changing them in at least three ways to make it your own. Clear and concise guidelines would be needed but this activity would be a lot of fun if students were to add a musical element to there pieces reflecting what they were listening to as they worked. 
An art historical lesson could be made about looking into the history or Dadaism or who created some of the first assemblages.  What was the inspiration behind the artist choices and how might the student use the same inspiration to create pieces of their own. 

Read & Reflect #3

It is a little strange to me to think of using blogging in my own classroom.  I have always felt it was tedious and frustrating to have to blog or respond in my collage classwork, but then I don't think I qualify as a Digital Native either.  When planning out lessons I think about playing with different media and how messy can you get and still have time to clean up and go to the next class.  This is probably not the first place everyone else starts with.  The other aspects I think about are what music would help in creativity while the students are working, which pieces of music have helped me in the past, and which contemporary or historical artist and/or artwork will lead to stronger student work.  After all these considerations I have often sat and written out lesson plans using pen and paper or makers or paint or whichever medium I'm working with.  Time always seems the biggest constraint for all the great ideas I come up with.  If I were able to utilize a class blog and present a new piece of artwork of artist, lets say on Friday as students leave class, and have each student investigate and respond by Monday morning.  Then my class time could be used to build upon the information.  Or if each student had a week to do their investigating without my input, but simply build on what other students in the class discover.  I could use the weekend to provide my thoughts on what they had discovered and start Monday with a whole wealth of information pertinent to each student. 

As I was thinking about what artwork I wanted to blog about I started going back through the images of my students work from this past semester.   I worked with students Kindergarten through 8th grade and before I taught a lesson I would make exemplars for each project.  I must be a little kid at heart because I had so much fun playing with paint, markers, wire, etc.  I had more fun making the projects than the kids did at times because I better understood the different mediums and how best to manipulate them.  Projects I thought would be a blast for the kids turned out to be exhausting because I ended up having to do so much work with each student individually.  With a classroom full of 20 to 30 students one on one attention is not an easy thing to do.
 So all that being said I decided to show pieces that I made for the students and then the students pieces which coincide with them.  This first piece is a project I created for my seventh graders at Pioneer Ridge Middle school. While student teaching I had the opportunity to attend a planning session of all the middle school teachers in the district.  There are over a thousand teachers in the Independence Public School District, and I was a little surprised to see only four middle school art teachers.  At these monthly meeting each teacher would bring a lesson plan or two which they had created for their kids and present it to the group.  One of the lessons was entitled Zentangle, a term I had just been reading about while looking for ideas for upcoming lessons.  Zentangle is an easy to learn method of creating beautiful images from repetitive patterns(artteacherscloset.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-art-room-zentangles.html), in case you have not heard of it.  I have always loved creating my writing styles, in high school I would draw my friends names out for them in Old English script for them for fun.  The idea of doing a project inspired by Zentangle seemed like a lot of fun.  
I started with the handout I was given and drew an E for my first initial. My host teacher Faith said she had about a hundred 8x11 canvases boards which were given to her and a box of various gauge wire that I could use it I wanted.  The project just kind of fell together as I was playing with the materials available to me.  Each student picked one letter from their initials, drew it using Zentangle inspired designs filling an 8 x11 piece of paper, painted over top their pencil lines with back tempra, used water color to fill in the spaces and add another design element, and finally used varying types of wire to make the letter stand off the page.  I am a perfectionist when it comes to my own artwork so I should have known that this was too involved for seventh grade students when it took me every bit of a hundred hours to finish my exemplar.  As the students were working on their pieces there was usually one step of the process which they excelled at and the rest were a struggle.  Most were able to get a design done and when they started using the tempra to paint over the pencil they would get frustrated with how slow and careful they had to be.  Many started out with intricate designs but by the time the wire was completed most detail was left out.  When it came time to work with the wire many students practically gave up because they couldn't make it do what they wanted.  One student Walter, loved every kind of art but he made a simpler kind of art.  His W here was complete in three class periods I think.  But I liked it more than many of the others because he did the best he personally could do and never complained.  If he wasn't sure how best to shape the wire or make a thin, straight line with the paint he would ask for help and try over and over until he was satisfied with the results. 

The original idea for this project came from a magazine of collaged winter scapes, but the more I looked for specific colors in magazines the harder it became to find enough variations in color.  I love color, and find that I am very sensitive to the subtle differences in shade, tone, and vibrancy.  This was a fifth grade project and my host teacher at the time Kristy, suggested that I use construction paper instead of magazines for the collageing She then showed me her cabinet of paper.  It was a beautiful thing, it really was.  I had so much fun going through and picking out every variations I could find.  It was fun up until I started cutting it all up.  I must have had forty different colors, again a bit of an over achievement.  I was hoping the kids would be able to create pieces with a pointillism quality to them, but realized far too late that these were just fifth graders meeting once a week for fifty minutes.  In explanation of the project I put together a PowerPoint of landscape images, but the students found it hard to be able to draw such detailed images in simple blocks of color.  I had made a collage out of magazine cuttings and was using it in addition to my lesson.  Again the students were confused on what exactly they should be doing so finally I decided to make another examplar for the classes.   I probably spent an entire weekend making the above piece and another similar piece.  Why I thought fifth graders could ever be expected to put anywhere near that much work into a project is a mystery.  I had a lot of fun doing this piece and my students seems to really like sorting through all the colors and wasting lots of glue.  The one element that I think really helps the collages make sense was adding the black tempera paint outline, and I owe it all to one of my students.  She asked if you could outline the edges of each section of color to help each one be more readable.  I was very resistant to put black paint on top of something I put so much effort into, but in the end it makes each images stand out to much more. 
I spent entirely too much time and effort on this piece but it was worth it in the end, for me anyway.  The student's pieces was awesome.  Even some of the ones I was skeptical of at first ended up being the greatest after a bit of black paint.  

Read & Reflect #2

My overall impression of the articles for this week is overwhelming inadequacy on my part to be able to connect with this iGeneration.  I may have been born apart of the Net Generation but I feel a decade behind.  As a kid we never had the internet until I moved out.  I didn’t own my first computer until I was nineteen.  My first cell phone was at the age of twenty-one, and I was reluctant even then to get one at all.  I liked being unreachable to my job and others if need be.  In the last five years I have been playing catch-up to be on an even keel with my classmates and peers.  Even now having a smart phone, I don’t feel at all up-to-date with the iGeneration students I want to be teaching. 

I have always viewed art making as a tactile (kinesthetic) process. As an artist I want to be able to feel the materials as much as see or smell or even hear them.  The smell or oil paint, the sound of a sewing machine or the creak of reeds as you weave them together, the vibrancy of color that is revealed as you open a kiln after hours of waiting, the dryness of pastel or charcoal as the dust filters to the floor.   There are many technologies which can be used to create art but I will always prefer the smell of chemicals in a dark room over the tedious hours spent in front of a Photoshop window. 

Every artist and student is different and deservedly so.  In Deresiewicy’s Solitude essay he repeatedly states that students of now and tomorrow will be incapable of disconnecting from media and technology.   “They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.”  Throughout art school I tried to work on and finish pieces with friends around me.  I always ended up working by myself in an empty art building in the middle of the night.  Solitude is a necessity for the contemplation process of any and all of my artwork.  I like to work in the middle of the night because no one is likely to be awake and need my attention.  I can be alone with my thoughts.  Music is likely to be my only companion I take, if any at all.  This concept seems to be at odds with the last two generational trends however.  I must always remember that the way things work for me is not likely to work for others. 

This last semester doing my student teaching I thought I would allow students to listen to music as they worked in an effort to create “MY” ideal working environment.  What I soon discovered was that my classical or instrumental music did nothing for the students but make them tired.  I decided to let them pick the genre of music and was amazed at how not relaxing an experience it was for me.  I could hardly concentrate on the lesson I was teaching but the students would be speeding away at their projects as though it was the greatest project ever.  If the current educational system is in fact static and passé the art room needs to be as forward thinking possible.  The room I had for 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders had ten student computers.  One of the first things the students asked of me was to be allowed to use said computers.  They went on to inform me that the computers were never touched.  As cell phone use was strictly forbidden in the classrooms I had no problem with the students getting on the computers to look up images for their projects, but that was about it.  My lesson plans were very hands on and only required the individual’s imagination.  Using Prezi instead of PowerPoint presentation went over well, I thought.  At least there were fewer distraction behaviors from the students.  But after reading and viewing all the technologies students associate as common place, my efforts seem feeble and grossly inadequate.    

I find myself leaning more and more towards Tapscott's opinions of the Net Generation possibly because I am a part of this so called "Dumbest Generation" and truly disagree with Bauerlein's conclusion. Or maybe I am aghast to associate myself with such a negative labeling. The thirteen traits of Rosen’s “Rewired” and the Eight Net Gen Norms” compiled by Tapscott are encouraging, but the characteristics of my “Net” generation and those of the iGeneration are not all positive. Is it that the iGeneration is being raised on a constant diet of technology or that parenting is being replaced by the use of technology because a single income is no longer enough to support a family? Are we allowing computers, television, videogames, etc. to raise the current generation of children because parents don’t have the time or energy to interact with their kids? “I come home from school, boot up my laptop, grab a snack, and get online. I stay there studying and talking to friends until mom calls me for dinner and then head back there right after dinner. Unless my mom or dad needs me I stay in my room until I go to sleep.” (Rewired, pg. 30) Is it really just about how the child wants to spend his time? I can’t fathom being so isolated and connected at the same time. Maybe I’m not as much a part of the net gen as I thought.
I was comforted by the idea that we are a generation of scrutinizing and critical individuals. As I was reading the section of Tapscott’s article on Scrutiny, the State Farm app commercial came to mind:
"I thought State Farm didn't have all those apps?"
"Where'd you hear that?"
"The internet."
"And you believed it?"
"Yeah, they can't put anything on the internet that isn't true."
"Where'd you hear that?"
"The internet." “The Internet.”
“Oh look, here comes my date. I met him on the internet. He’s a French model!”
“Ah, Banj’or” www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I
State Farm uses this idiocy of the statement “They can’t put anything on the internet that isn’t true.” to dispel views notions that they are not keeping up with technology. But when I was a kid my parents were very distrustful of anything related to the internet. I remember my teachers continuously reminding us that Wikipedia was not a credible source of information for papers. If half of what you read on the internet is false in one way or another, no wonder people are skimming through articles instead of “sustained, undistracted reading”(Nicholas Carr – Is Google making us stupid).
After reading Carr’s article I updated my status on Facebook with Richard Foreman’s conclusions of today’s society. I particularly agreed with his “pancake people” statement. “‘Pancake people’ are spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” (Richard Foreman). I was interested to see if any of my “friends” would comment, question, argue, anything really. After four and a half days I haven’t received even a “like”. Whereas if I had posted a picture of my cat doing something stupid and cat like I would have received all kinds of feedback. I don’t think of my friends as being dumb or shallow in thought, but I am somewhat disappointed in the lack of response because I posted something which required deeper thinking. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds” (Nicholas Carr – Is Google making us stupid).

Read & Reflect #1

In six weeks I will be celebrating my first 29th birthday, and depending on the day I feel ever so old. I recently went on a trip with two “little old ladies”, one is the mother of my childhood friend and the other her sister. I do not consider myself to be tech savvy in any way, but last September I joined the smartphone revolution and succumbed to having an outlandish phone bill in estrange for staying connected. This summer I spent 2 weeks with these ladies who learn to type on a manual type writer, bought cell phones only because their children asked them to before going on a cross country trip, have no idea what a GPS is or how to use it, get confused after night because of night blindness.

If I need to figure out where the closest Wal-Mart is I pick up my phone and Google it. I know how to follow a GPS because I had to learn to use it while driving a cab for two years. There are things that I now find simple and second nature, like using my phone and every 5 seconds anytime I want to clarify some fact that I never would have foreseen even three years ago. Anytime I want to make sure I'm telling someone I'm free on the right day I look at my phone. Things that I have always needed to use my memory for, I have replaced with my phone. I don’t know if it is a positive step forward, my memory is worse than ever, but I wouldn't go back. I've come to think of myself is much more technology advanced. In the first few years of college if I needed something done on my computer I had to ask a friend favor. With the absence of said friend over the last two years I have learned to do it for myself. It was often painfully hard and took forever, but I did it because it was a necessity.

This new generation, who from infancy has been surrounded by technology that is continuing to change, evolve, advance, there is no struggle to stay caught up. They are continually learning, but without the struggle to adapt or rewire ones brain. David hockey was an important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s. He started off making entire pieces with Polaroid images. He has evolved with the technology over the years and his art making has changed with it, who is to say which is better. Who says that taking picture with a Polaroid and using thousands of them to document a life or experience is any better or less valuable than using an iPad and spending hours upon hours making these intricate and amazing painting. He created an entire gallery of iPad paintings which he featured in the Biennale, a world renown and prestigious thing.

I have always had issues being able to type as fast as the thoughts come to my mind. I have struggled with blogging or responding to comments on Blackboard and finding a way to type fast enough to get the thought down before it’s gone. I read terribly slow and dyslexic; many times I lose the thought before I can get it typed. Through the use of my smart phone I can talk and it types; I can get all the thoughts down before they're gone, even creating this post I'm using my phone.

One thing that impressed me from the video was how Korea overcame their economic crisis with technology. Creating free internet everywhere provided people access to the technology to better their family. With this quote blessing they also created a new list of problems that they are making strides to cure, like the psychologist who spent years studying the effects of internet. Does the advancement of technology make us better at multitasking or does being able to go through 12 different things all at once mean you have no attention span. I know even doing my homework I was distracted over and over and over by my phone, email, etc. I am distracted by the technology around me, but is it because I'm easily distracted or because technology is making me more distracted.

After watching this documentary and reading these articles I have never felt a larger generational gap to the kids are growing up a technology saturated life. Is there a balance, I think so, but it comes from the parents providing boundaries. As educators we're not in the home; we are not the ones to set boundaries in their daily lives. We need to give students access to opportunities to better themselves. As teachers we have to improve and grow and learn every bit as much as the world of technology is changing.

Hello, my name is Esther McCune and for me art making is not successful until my hands are dirty, my clothes are stained and the room I’m working in is in a state of organized chaos.

This is the start of my third year in my certification/master’s program at MU and true to form I am late getting enrolled in my classes because of some conflict with any one of a half a dozen departments. I love and hate MU, I can’t stress enough how much I have respected and enjoyed my teachers but with equally as much frustration I have hated having to deal with the bureaucracy of MU.
This past spring I did my student teaching in the Independence School District and loved every minute of it. I got wonderful recommendations for all four of my principles and full marks from my host teachers, but no job yet. So I will continue moving forward with the program and continue trying to get a teaching position.

The piece below is one of my 8th graders, we had a lot of storms last spring and I wanted to incorporate them into my lesson plans.

The second is one of Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire from the Nelson Adkins in Kansas City, a personal favorite

The last two are a pastel piece I did for a friend last fall so that he would have a reminder of home while stuck in Columbia MO